Aibu to hate Michael Gove?

I always hated him - mainly because of how he pushed Brexit.

Could he be sued for professional negligence/ misrepresentation/ fraud?

But that’s not the way it’s taught. English literature is a singularly turgid subject and most kids drag themselves through it with the help of Betts study guides. I’m not saying it should be removed from the curriculum completely; there’s no reason it can’t be available for those kids who like a bit of Macbeth or Jane Eyre, but it should not take precedence over skills and knowledge that will actually help kids get decent jobs.

It makes dar more sense to develop those transferable skills through texts which actually have relevance to many more people, such as books on politics, economics, psychology, science, history or geography - even philosophy. They’re not the preserve of English literature, and nor is the study of relationships.

Hard agree, and no matter how you dress up the academies movement, it's just Gove made immaterial (and billions of pounds of value taken out of education). It will never be anything else.

Just because local authorities have withered and died around trust creation doesn't make academy trusts any less dodgy.

I don’t know, when I did my degree in the early 2000’s I had to call my mum to ask for help on something and she told me she had covered it at a-level when she was at school in the 70’s. I think we’ve been dumbing down education to make it more accessible so that more of us could get to university but it’s been damaging to educational standards in the UK and it’s happened over decades. I looked at some of her old gcse textbooks once, mind blown about how difficult they were.

Many of us probably should not have been going to university if we are being honest and a lot of this is because we don’t value things like apprenticeships and learning on the job. You don’t need to have a degree to be an excellent accountant for example, many I know are now working and studying alongside that.

how many times will your kids be asked about the relationship between Titania and Oberon in a job interview

This is incredibly short-sighted and depressing and completely misses the point. The ability to understand, analyse and interpret complex texts is an extremely useful transferable skill, not to mention that an understanding of the nuances of human relationships is something that AI will likely never be able to do. The study of English literature is about what makes us human; it is not learning facts about the set texts.

I have a child at an indy and do alot of peripatetic work at the same school.

I have NEVER heardd any teacher say anything good about Michael Gove. And it's been discussed extensively in my presence. (Mainly around the GCSE programme which is what I am involved with). Teachers hate him with a spitting helpless fury.

Wow, haven’t even started the full thread and I am so shocked that’s the situation.
We should all absolutely know this, it seems really important

But kids won’t be using pen and paper in the workplace. They’ll be using IT, AI, social media. They need to know it. I’d rather my kids know how to code, build apps, use AI, and have a thorough grounding in sustainability as those are core future skills.

English lit. should be an option. It’s a ‘nice to have’ but how many times will your kids be asked about the relationship between Titania and Oberon in a job interview?

OP, if I remember correctly, wasn’t that gobshite Dominic Cummings Gove’s SPAD in the Department of Education at the time? He was central to driving those reforms that did so much damage. Everything he touches turns to shit.

My favourite Gove moment was when he announced on breakfast TV children if separated parents would have to pick one to stay with during covid- threw half the nation into an absolute panic -and inevitably had to backtrack by evening. Dangerous incompetence but hey ho the nation voted for it.

He is old public school taught and should never been in charge of education. Everything must be exam based…this does not suit all pupils. The secondary school curriculum is outdated. What the kids have to learn by the end of primary is crazy with too much emphasis on testing.

He’s gay which is I assume the reason for his divorce. There were some obviously staged pics of him with a woman in the tabloids not long after but he’s into men and (rumour has it) has some “interesting” proclivities involving sex and drugs.

And yes, he’s an absolute evil creep who f*cked up everything he touched.

OP you are a genius to have put your finger on this.

Brilliant points all round. It’s about time the curriculum was reviewed and all this fronted adverbial rubbish removed.

Hahahahaha that is priceless.

I completely agree. Gove caused so much damage and set primary education along a path of no return. I look at my ds’s frazzled teachers and I think, “I wonder what you’d be like if you were allowed to teach in the same way my teachers taught us.”

Gove sucked all the pleasure out of education - both teaching and learning. There is so much more to life than SATS targets. He was a pathetic, narrow-minded little man who lacked true understanding and vision.

I think there's something about Education Secretaries that goes to their head, probably an extension of "I was at school so I know all about education". It becomes a playground for those who didn't make Home or Foreign Secretary; you only have to see how often the post holder moves on.
David Blunkett was pretty awful. I remember him saying that education had to focus on everything, the precursor of Gove's all pupils to be above average at maths. The other thing was the literacy hour, especially the bit where the government put up a whole bank of pretty good lessons, and then got all pissed off when teachers used them. The message is always do it yourself.

Same with OFSTED heads: Chris Woodhead, Michael Wilshaw. Both had active contempt for teachers. Woodhead was particularly venomous.
Having said that, Sir Keith Joseph introduced 100% coursework GCSEs which was a surprise coming from a Tory. I'm aware of how it could be and was fiddled, having taught and examined it, so it had to go.

Seeing the destruction wrought by Gove from the safe distance of Australia, I'm glad I got out to a (then) benign system (largely due to their not being able to organise a piss-up in a brewery).

When my dd’s both massively struggled with their GCSE content and asked me why they have to memorise 12 poems and reams of equations and formula that they just can’t keep in their heads, my answer has always been ‘because of Michael Gove’. Exams should be about how you apply information not memorising it in imo. Watching the stress and anxiety they go through and not be able to do anything about it is heartbreaking and makes me so angry at him for doing this to them. 😡

its because the whole schooling system is designed as a factory @merrycola

I’ve been shouting this with new sen reforms- it’s not good enough to have hubs etc for kids who are struggling- make the curriculum accessible to start with!!
Talk about ‘everyone above average’ - the average GCSE grade (of those who sat them, so immediately takes out kids taking alternative quals or not taking as many/any for whatever reason) is a 4. That means over half the population get a 4 or below, but the curriculum expectations teach to 7+. No wonder teens are anxious and disaffected.

I'm find the posts on AI interesting. The texts I see at work which are written by AI are so long-winded. For example, they might include: "This report has the status of Not Yet Reviewed. It has been assigned to Rupert Smith and Demelza Jones. Rupert and Demelza will need to liaise with each other and manage their time effectively in order to complete the review in a timely manner."

NB - Rupert and Demelza are both directors and they review a lot of reports. I'm not sure they need a lecture on time management.

Teachers said this at the time and tried to raise the alarm but no one seemed to care.

Op you wrote it so well - for all of those reasons and more, I can't stand the man.

Then the little snivelling rat also somehow got most of the country on his side for Brexit.

Horrible, horrible man, who makes me want to punch him every time I see his face.

Most of us are just much, much less articulate than this. Here's the evidence to me. (I am an AI product manager, so I spend a lot of time looking at this stuff):

1. Use of weapons-grade punctuation - most tell-tale here is the em-dash. But also the Oxford comma and the colon. I'd be surprised if you find another post using the colon like that here. It's just a bit sophisticated for everyday writing.
2. That teacher-like, I-am-the-expert-walking-you-though-this ("let’s connect the dots.") which makes it sound like a TED talk.
3. The sheer variety of sentence length and connectors
4. Light use of simile/metaphor is unusual (although having said that I now see I have used a metaphor)
5. The layering of desciptions/adjectives. Little groups of 3. I mean, again, who does that?
6. It is all very cerebral, an intellectual argument. Each point so carefully crafted and simply explained. So persuasive. 8)The emotions are so very refined, restrained and appropriate that it's not quite real. Most people run a bit messier than this, I think
7. Use of final, beautifully succinct 2 sentence summarisation of whole of the argument is a real tell.
8. But most of all, it is a very persuasive & well-crafted piece of writing, beyond the abilities of most of us but I think that is at odds with a somewhat simplistic premise.

I am far, far from being a Michael Gove fan. Fronted adverbials bring me out in hives. But there is no consideration here given to many other factors that could influence outcomes for our children: social media, Covid, changing social and family patterns, lack of effective sanction on children, growing gaps between rich and poor. If you could write this well, I think your argument would be more nuanced.

Fronted adverbials. What the absolute fuck?? Fuck off you cunt Gove.

YANBU OP and well said 👏

I also do want to point out that quite a lot of the educational establishment opposed phonics when it was introduced. I don’t agree with a lot of the Gove reforms, but I think that it would also be fair to say that unions do tend to oppose everything and could be more selective and constructive…..

Hmmm, well yes and no. I went to a high achieving ofsted outstanding primary school in the 90s and standards were quite low in many ways - it was fine, as the top table just worked through a text book and I found at secondary that I was a year ahead in maths, but there was really nothing for me, learned grammar from reading, zero guidance on how you might do creative writing, very low expectations really. And those on the lowest tables left school with 3s in their SATs, which was functionally not very literate at all for the next stage of education (I had mixed class in year 7 in a very mixed school and quite a high proportion of my classmates could not read well, let alone write well). And that low achievement culture does follow through - it was a shock getting to university when you’ve frankly been able to coast through and no one has ever given you feedback - the kids from the private schools were streets ahead in essay writing etc.

I don’t think fronted adverbials and all that stuff is necessary, but 90s education was not super either. There was also lots of crazy stuff and shouting back then too. In fact, as a chatty five year old who hadn’t finished her “work” in reception, I was yelled at and made to work in solitary confinement behind a screen in the classroom for a week (I never told my mum this until over a decade later as I thought it was my fault!) and people were made to sit in the corner facing the wall as punishment etc. There were masses of filler exercises like colouring in and worksheets in years 1 and 2 and I would lie and say I’d finished so I could go to the play corner as I realised that no one ever checked them and they were pointless - I was an engaged child who loved doing the reading and maths and it was quite tedious that there was so little of it for so long.

I have a four year old who I’d happily keep in a forest school type kindergarten until they reach 6 - I’m not arguing that kids should be pushed hard from 4. Frankly, if I could choose for him to be outside making bird boxes for two more years as in NZ or Finland I would. However, that wasn’t my childhood either and there was a lot of unproductive filler!